Season Wrap-Up

Well, that was a pretty intense winter. We had record cold (coldest February on record), near-record snows, multiple blizzards, a firewood shortage… there wasn’t much time between the shoveling and ice-dam mitigation missions to sit down and type. Also, I went skiing for a while.

But it seems to be over now. We had tonight what will likely be the last fire of the year, so I pulled up the datalogger data for the winter to see where things settled out. I was a little late in getting the logger running at the start of the season… but here is the graph, from December 2 to today:

The average temp for this winter was… 54.6ºF — which is 0.1º colder than last winter! Standard deviation = 5.0º. The maximum temp was 71.0º (house sitter, who had fully permission to make herself comfortable : ) Minimum temp = 41.1º. So, all in all, pretty consistent with winters past.

But, this may be the last year of wood-only heat. Certain residents are strongly requesting that we get a “real” heating system, and, coincidently, the natural gas company is bringing a line down our street this summer. We are looking at various other options (pellet boilers, mini-splits, nuclear) but one way or another by next winter we will probably have something that operates with one of those new-fangled “thermo-stats” that you hear about. Still, it’s my plan to keep using cordwood as the primary.

Meanwhile, in other efforts towards sustainability– a solar PV array went up on the garage roof earlier this week:

Yesterday it cranked out 28 kWh, which I was pretty pleased with. Today was rainy and cloudy, so only 14. I’m hoping for a year-round average of at least 16 kWh/day, to make this worthwhile. We shall see…